You can look at my disclaimers list from the previous review - normally, I'd copy it here, again, but given how closely tied together these two reviews are, I felt a simple link works just as well.
All right, the fluff's over, let's get down to the review.
Background
Dragon Fantasy: Book II is the direct sequel to Dragon Fantasy: Book I (duh). It is available on PSN for Playstation 3 and PS Vita. Style-wise, Book II is very much dead-set on 16-bit, taking on the strongest tones of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV-VI, and others of the same ilk at almost every turn. Good on Muteki to pick a style and stick with it, but like Book I beforehand, this lends itself to a few quirks, pitfalls, and disappointments.
Story / writing
Book II picks up where Book I left off - Ogden and crew are sailing away from Sandheim, bound for Hong Kong secret pirate island. They arrive there, and Ogden swims to shore. After being accosted shortly thereafter by Imperial patrols, they set off again, and after a brief ship-to-ship skirmish, the story takes a very Final Fantasy VI-esque turn, and allows you to choose between three separate lines. Your party is thus split, with the ever helpful Moogle rock monster acting as your guide to choose your adventure(s).
Things get a little funky here, as the lines cross over each other to a great enough extent that playing them in the 'not-exactly-as-intended' may give you early access to undue spoilers, or unjustly buff your party for the next segment. For example, I chose Ogden's path first, and almost immediately discovered that Ramona (half of one of the other lines) was/is embroiled in quite the bloodbath at the local coliseum. A curious time to discover that, as Ramona's path (which I ended up doing last) didn't place her at the coliseum until two thirds into her line.
After all is said and done, and the full party is reunited (plus a few extras along the way), the game turns back into straight-line RPG. You blast through a few more dungeons, end up fighting a demon lord, and yadda yadda yadda, game over, credits roll, thinly veiled hint that the story isn't over.
As in Book I, the writing is quite good, with plenty of tropes and original witticisms built in more-or-less seamlessly with the rest of the game. With the bitness dial notched solidly at '16', there's a fresh crop of memes and callbacks, which starts immediately with a rather chuckle-worthy opening cutscene / scrolling dialog of Link to the Past origin. Books and minor story elements are similarly well-written, and there's enough connections to Book I that make playing them in order as a matched pair greater than playing them individually.
Visuals
Huge upgrade in this department. No longer limited to 8-bit tile sizes, color limitations, and two-frame animations, the visual flair of Book II over its predecessor is self evident. This now being 16-bit, it would be remiss not to include a healthy dose of Mode 7; and so it does, with the title demo and overworld travel heavily dependent on the once-undisputed pseudo-3D technique of the gods.
Colors and overall character design are well done, with somewhat less palette-swapping for enemy duplication - though the more human-like 'monsters' and village NPCs still look odd as groups of identically-drawn sprites. Not necessarily a fault of Dragon Fantasy, but a casualty of following the classic 16-bit style a little too closely.
The menus see very little change, with the same thick chrome and flat colors of Book I throughout - an odd stylistic choice, considering the vast visual strides made everywhere else.
One other anomaly of note is intermittent lagging. Despite the visual upgrade, there's nothing here to really stress the hardware of either the PS3 or the Vita. None of the usual suspects are here, either - too many sprites, too much movement, running too fast - just a strange, semi-random jittering. Isolated, but flow-breaking.
Audio
The music is greatly improved. Gone are the atrociously-tinny MIDIs, replaced by much better orchestrated semi-MIDIs (honestly, I don't know - I'm no music technologist). As before, each area has a unique tune, all minor and semi-major battles share one, the overwolds has one, et cetera. Props for making a well-needed upgrade.
What was not fully repaired, however, was the audio lurch between tracks. Though less pronounced, objectively, that it still exists amongst great musical strides is one of those great curiosities.
Some of the sound effects also seem curiously lo-fi, especially the menu traversal blips. Not much improvement here over Book I, which, given the almost complete overhaul of everything else, is slightly disappointing.
Movement / travel
The overworld is done up completely in Mode 7, with full 360-degree rotation and what seems to be 30-45-degree pitch. Full marks for hitting Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy VI here, even if the effect is outclassed by anything even remotely modern. It doesn't help that the first half of the game is, again, limited to pre-defined boat destinations. Jury is split on whether not being able to make landings without a port is good or bad after you can control the boat.
Movement within an area of interest - town, dungeon, forest path, whatever - is generally pretty good. There are some parts where the differences in elevation - or more basically, travelable vs. untravelable - are not immediately apparent, so you spend a couple seconds running against well-concealed barrier.
One odd duck that happened more often than is easily forgiveable is the sudden punting of NPCs across an area. Approach someone from the correct angle, and...BOOM, there they go. They stop at the first solid barrier, but...really? Collision detection is average, at best, and is certainly a curiosity when battles are involved.
Battles and major mechanics
The main name of the game is still battles, and the influence of choice is certainly Chrono Trigger sans the 'active time' flair. You have as much time as you choose, which detracts a little from the immediacy and weightof your decisions, and results only in enemies shifting very slightly around the field. A good inclusion is the area- or line-of-effect attacks, including a handy outline to show which is which and what enemies will be caught by it.
As in Book I's intermission chapter, you can capture monsters with nets to add them to your party (for fun; or, more often, for fetch quests). These monsters will then level with you and can be equipped with certain things. This is especially helpful in the early-game, or during branches when you have very few actual party members. Captured monsters can be swapped out in major towns with a pub - though I'm curious why they would be allowed as patrons anyway.
Also present from Book I is a very basic crafting system. It plays a decent part on its own in providing upgraded gear for your captured monster buddies, but after your party is filled with actual characters, there's essentially no point to it other than cluttering up your item list.
Back to battles, there's one addition here that is quite clever. When you enter a battle, other wandering enemies can join it at any time if they are within range. This does add some dynamism, though thanks to muted difficulty (see below) offers little beyond the novelty. In certain cases, the collision detection is such that it becomes very odd and frustrating rather than amusingly glitchy. In particular, cases where an airborne enemy can't seem to join the battle, despite...you know...being able to fly. Or when an enemy joins late but is totally obscured by UI elements so the battle appears to be hung up. Or - my personal favorite - an enemy is so far away that it takes the attacking character (and any counter-attackers) five seconds to walk over, and another five seconds to walk back. So, a mixed bag with this new addition - a good idea, but some cases poorly implemented.
Of particular curiosity is that finishing a couple battles hard-locked the game. Once, to disable all buttons except the 'PS' button, and once to disable the entire controller and require a hard power-down via the console itself. Not a great experience and certainly not inspiring confidence in the game's stability. Thankfully, in both instances the auto-save kicked in just before the glitched battles, and further issues were not encountered.
Difficulty
Sadly, even the peak of 16-bit RPGs had very little noteworthy to really drive home a hard-fought, well-won game, and Book II does little, if anything, to rectify this. All the battles are roughly the same, whereby you are either minimally equipped and leveled (and can breeze through with ample button-mashing) or you are far outclassed (and are instantly slaughtered). There are few points to really wander too far off the beaten path, so the latter case is rare. Add to this the continuing 'on-death, lose half gold and return to last save point' mechanic, and you have basically no consequence other than time lost to drive you to play with strategy.
One 'pro' in this category is that very little grinding is truly necessary. Like many non-random-encounter classics of old(e), as long as you fight most of the battles along your path, you will be prepared enough. I see this as a 'win' for not forcing needless fluff upon the player..
Another 'pro' is that if you far outclass the enemy combatants, you clear the field and move on without a fight. A very welcome nod to Earthbound, and one of the better timesavers if you decide to trek through previously-stomped grounds.
UI
Some of the same UI issues that plagued Book I are still well and truly present in Book II. Though the UI sounds are a bit snappier, just because you hear a blip doesn't mean the action you wanted to take place actually happened. And, thanks to a lengthened fade-in / fade-out sequence, what little patience I had is ground to dust all the quicker. Cue wrong spells, wrong party members, wrong result.
Another pain point that rears its ugly head again is ignoring inputs on entering a new area. If I run from the overworld into town, I am locked in place until I release all buttons. Come on, why is that still there?
A new annoyance that appears is missing lists of merchants' goods if you swap between buying and selling modes too quickly. Particularly noticeable if you're checking how much you can sell versus what you need for that next tier of equipment. Not game-breaking, but it does coste you some time to completely back out of the exchange and re-engage.
While the production values, as a whole, are greatly improved, the lack of a group buy, paging up and down in long lists, and ever-so-slightly longer fade are annoyances bordering perilously close to rage-inducing
Let's wrap it up now
I'll admit to not being enthused about 'new' 8-bit RPGs - I still love the classics for what they are, but we've progressed so far since then - so seeing a 16-bit upgrade is already an immense pre-relief. However, 16-bit is also 'classic', and there are plenty of aspects here that, like Book I, went unimproved, or were even re-implemented poorly. Such is the cautionary tale of sticking too close to a revered style; there's some to gain, surely, but there is also much to lose, either directly or by comparison.
Dragon Fantasy: Book II suffers from both - it smells so heavily of Chrono Trigger that I am immediately beset by a wave of good times to be had, thanks purely to my background as a classically-raised gamer. The overall production values are definitely in line here, but the pain points in something as basic (and critical) as UI and collision detection reek strongly of sloppiness. More testing and paying attention to Book I's flaws could have done wonders.
The game, taken independently, is decent in its own right. Consider the pedigree of the games it chose to emulate and it drops a not-insignificant amount in quality. A good shot at '16-bit classic', to be sure, but lacking the polish and stability of an era long past.
